The U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike claimed on Wednesday that a flaw in its quality control system was the reason behind the software update that downed computers all around the world last week, affecting services ranging from banking and healthcare to aviation.
The malfunction that caused computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash and display the “Blue Screen of Death” occurred in CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, an advanced platform that guards systems against malicious software and hackers. This is what caused Friday’s outage.
“An internal quality control mechanism failed, allowing the problematic data to evade the company’s own safety checks.
As a result, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data,” CrowdStrike stated in a statement.
That content data’s nature and the reasons it was troublesome were not disclosed by CrowdStrike. What the software looks for and how to react to threats is determined by what is called a “Template Instance.”
In an effort to keep the problem from happening again, it has included a “new check” to its quality control procedure.
Source (CNBC)
